Petit Rat

[stringed instrument] We can do this together.

One, two... One, two, three, four, five, six.

[Vera] Today, I want to just finish up the choreography that we started in to the studio.

I'm working with my mom who is 80 years old.

One, and two, three, and four, five, six, step forward, and then step back, eight, and one, and two, and three, and four, and five, and six, and seven, and eight.

It's the same thing, same thing on both sides.

So there's only a hitch kick on the first one and then a hitch kick on the second one.

[soft music] I love dancing.

I always did.

[Deborah] You were very good at it.

I always did.

I would dance by myself.

I still do.

Not anymore, but I... like you say, I hear music, with me, it's music.

If I hear music, it always translates in movement in my head.

When I was younger, when you were taking your naps, I would do grand jts in the family room.

I remember that.

[soft music] [Fernande] I started dancing when I was eight in Paris, and it was just before World War II, I began to dance.

I remember meeting for the first time the great ballerina of the time during the Tsarist period who came to France after the Russian revolution.

This was Madame Olga Preobrajenskaya.

I remember that first day still when she greeted my mother and I, and then I began, and it was wonderful.

They took me to Place Clichy, which was the place where all of the great dancers went to study before they went into the Opera in Paris to dance.

I was already very advanced, and I remember Olga Preobrajenskaya wanted me to go into the Petit Rat de l'Opera, the "Little Rats" of the Opera, who were the young ballerinas that came out of the Opera in Paris.

And then 1940, the war broke out in September.

That was the end for me in Paris.

During the war, I still had my slippers and I would sometimes dance.

And when I had my two daughters, I said, they are going to dance.

And that's what happened.

I found Irine Fokine by looking in the newspaper and seeing her name advertised, and right away it clicked.

I said, that must be it.

Irine Fokine was the niece of Michel Fokine who was a choreographer of Ballets Russes in France.

Her mother had been a ballerina herself, and that influenced me a lot to have my daughters go there.

She knew how to teach the technique, the movement and the way your arms follow the music.

The kids that came out from there became dancers.

So I brought the two girls there.

[Vera] I was five, when I started dancing, Deborah was six and a half.

When I would walk into our classroom at Miss Fokine's, I always felt very nervous.

It was very competitive.

She was so anxiety-ridden.

She would yell a lot, and you never knew what her mood was going to be.

[Vera] On one level, she was phenomenal.

And on the other level, she was a taskmaster.

Oh, now, that's disgusting.

Point your stupid feet.

[Fernande] Kids who see dances, see only the beauty of it, the glamour, but it is really a tough world.

[Fernande] She knew that's the way it was in real life.

when you joined the ballet company.

I find it's like being a nun.

You have to sacrifice quite a lot.

It's an unpleasant part of the whole thing.

And it is a shame, because ballet is so beautiful.

[Vera] Immediately, Debbie showed that she was a child prodigy.

What would happen is that we were compared constantly in class, and Irine Fokine would run with it.

She made no bones about playing it out against each other, you know.

She would say things like, "Why can't you do what your sister does?

Your sister does so much better than you."

And as a kid, that's a pretty tough thing to hear.

Over time, it took a toll.

I was so angry at you for being the star and being the focus.

I know it shaped me and I know that it defined our relationship.

And I know that you watched a lot of it and you couldn't stop it.

It was hurting me, because I love you both.

And I felt sometimes, you know, that Debbie was shining and you weren't.

[Vera] Uh-huh.

I had ideas about education.

I was strict, controlling.

You had to do what you were told.

I couldn't see it in any other way in the beginning.

I didn't know how to deal with it.

And at the same time, I saw Debbie's talent and your different talent.

It was a different talent, it was a more creative talent.

You are sisters and very close, almost like you're twins.

You were born 16 months apart.

No, no, we're not twins.

[Deborah] Well, we were brought up like twins.

But we had to go through a really, really big transition, each of us, to not be twins, and develop our individuality.

[Vera] My parents used to love to ask us to perform when we had family over.

So Debbie and I would put on our pink tights and our black leotards, and we would dance in the family room.

It felt like we were the ponies to be tried out, which we were, in a sense.

[Deborah] They were very proud of us.

Especially Mom.

She had to show us off.

[piano] [Deborah] Becoming a professional, didn't feel totally in my control.

Part of me deeply wanted to become a dancer because I love dancing, but there was that part of me that just-- I had no control over where my life was going.

It was my mother pushing me into those arenas that I just knew that's where I had to go.

So it wasn't like, right, yeah!

I want to become a ballet dancer!

I know these are the things that I have to do, and it wasn't all that clear cut.

[Vera] I was a five-year-old little girl who fell in love with a dance form.

I knew how to move.

I felt the strength and the flexibility from that.

I was becoming this dancer.

I left Fokine when I was 17, went to Penn State and discovered contemporary dance.

It was so different than ballet.

It was as rigorous, but in a totally different way.

I was doing something that I absolutely loved, loved to do.

I was never happier than when I was studying and rehearsing and working with a company, and doing a show.

And I mean, I just loved it.

I was so happy.

And until I met my husband, Russell, I considered that my first true love of my life.

[soft music] By the time I was with Ballet Repertory Company, I was already essentially a professional dancer at a very young age.

I had a job, I was getting a paycheck and I was, again, navigating that young adulthood.

When I saw Deborah, I thought, she is going to be something else.

I thought she was gonna be the next Marcia Hayde.

I thought she was going to be a great actress-dancer.

But she was very hard on herself, and it didn't take me long to realize that she was insecure.

And that worried me a little bit, because she was just somber.

She didn't play around like a lot of the other teenagers did.

She was a quiet one.

[piano] There was just something missing, something that was holding her back.

Can you talk about being a Petit Rat?

I was going to enter the Opera and be one of the "little rats", les Petit Rats.

And then the war broke out.

I was a loner anyway, before the war.

I grew up by myself.

I had no sister, no brother, My cousin, Florette, I saw only on holidays.

[Fernande] [Fernande] [Florette] [sirens] [Fernande] When the Germans started to bomb Paris, we had to wear gas masks and run into the subway.

Night was always connected with bombardments, and I still feel uncomfortable at night, even now.

For another year or so we remained in Paris.

That's when things began to be worse.

We were so scared that my father said, "Okay, we just leaving Paris.

And we are going to go to the Free Zone."

We went to a place called Vierzon which was the demarcation line between the occupied zone and the free zone.

In order to be able to go from one zone to another, you needed a passeur who had an identity card.

They would get paid for that, of course.

My mother had a passeur and I had a passeur.

And my mother passed first with her passeur.

And there was no problem.

I came next.

I was supposed to be five or six, but the German at the demarcation line said to my so-called father, "She can't pass, she's not six years old."

He said it in German and I understood German.

So I said to my so-called father... [speaks French] "What does he want, this man?"

When he heard me say that, the German said, "Okay, you can go."

In the meantime, my mother had seen the whole scene on the other side and she was ready to run back to see what was wrong with me, why wasn't I going through.

So finally, I went through, no problem.

That was something that stayed in my mind all my life.

When we were on rsidence force in the Savoie, they would give us a carte d'identit, an identity card with the "Jew", Juif, stamped in red.

I had to face very virulent antisemitism.

Kids would throw stones at me in the streets and yelling, "slut", "dirty kike".

The identity that was put on me was so despicable, that I had no pride, you know, in myself.

I was scared to say that I was Jewish.

One day in the classroom, on my desk, I found a picture of the so-called Jew, you know, with the nez crochu, hooked nose.

They all signed their name to this.

And I see this paper with this caricature and Madame Moliaix, my teacher, was standing there and I gave her the paper and she looked at it and I remember her veins stuck out, she got so angry.

She gave to the class a lesson in tolerance.

It was a dangerous thing to do.

And she did it.

Madame Moliaix, she came in once to my parents and said to my mother, "You know, you ought to keep Fernande at home, because I understand they're going to come down and make some raids and they may pick her."

But she said, "You know, you will not have to worry, because we will hide the children.

If anything happens, we will hide them".

But just the idea would scare my mother, and for a while we stayed and we went up in the mountains to hide.

That's what the war meant to me-- running suddenly and go up in the mountains.

We stayed there for four years.

[Fernande] It's the house belonging to our friend Andr Chagnon.

[Fernande] [woman] [Fernande] [Fernande] [guitar] [woman sings in French] [Fernande] [Michle] [Michle] [Fernande] [Fernande] It's funny.

If not for all those memories, it would be a quaint little town.

When you were hidden in the south of France, would you dream about being a ballet dancer?

I would do, I would dance by myself.

So when we had company, we had a piano, that was the entertainment.

I would dance my dance to Liszt.

And I remember the father of my friend, Lillian, he loved to see me dance.

He would say to, he was German, but he spoke Yiddish, and he would say, "Come on maideleh, dance, dance."

And then he was taken, he went to Auschwitz.

And when we came back, I remember, we went for his birthday.

He wouldn't come out of the room.

He wouldn't want to see us, you know-- How long was he in Auschwitz?

Two years or so.

And he was...

He wanted me to dance.

So I danced, you know, I would make up, I played the Liszt, and do the [humming], you know?

[piano] I love dancing.

It was exhilarating to me.

I didn't forget ballet, ever.

Never.

[Fernande] When I came back after the war, I was already 12, 13 and I went back to Madame Preobrajenskaya, Place Clichy, and the shock of my life was that she didn't recognize me.

It was such a blow, I remember.

Also, I had lost everything, you know, the turnout.

I still had the grace.

She looked at me, I remember, she was taking my arm and putting it in the certain way, telling me how to hold myself.

And that was the last time she let me take a class with her.

I had to go into another class with her assistant, and as I was watching the other girls doing everything that I had known how to do but my body was already too old for that.

My great disappointment was Madame Preobrajenskaya ignoring me.

So I stopped.

I never became a Petit Rat, never.

And then when I had my girls, I said, that's what they're gonna be, what I was not able to do.

[Deborah] I was brought up to do as I was told, to be a good girl, to do what my mom and dad said, and Mom wanted me to dance.

It was her dream, because, you know, when she went through the Holocaust, she wanted, that was how she wanted to kind of fulfill that, I think, by seeing us dance.

So part of me just loved dancing, but part of me had to live up to an expectation.

that was difficult, always to reach, It affected me a lot through my life, 'cause I felt like I never could...

I can't, I can't.

[Vera] Because my mother was so involved with her story as a survivor, there was no room for a lot of other things.

There was no room for... you in this, because it was so overwhelming, this story, this history of hers.

And I was so afraid to have children.

I just didn't think that I could become a mother.

And then there were those health issues that came along.

I got breast cancer twice over a period of five years.

And it was at that moment that I didn't know if that was supposed to be something to further stop me from having a child.

My experience with my mother being a Holocaust survivor was that I took on the mantle and the burden of her childhood.

I physically took it on somehow.

It was in my blood.

[soft music] I met my husband Russell when I was 27 years old.

And I was pretty much starting to leave the business by that point.

I had felt like a serious failure about my career, because I had never achieved the level that I had wanted to achieve.

And he gave me the strength to push beyond it and to discover what it meant to really love someone and to be loved for who you are.

[piano] The eating disorder that I had began in my early teens.

I was deeply addicted to sugar, like somebody would be addicted to cigarettes or alcohol, and I would do anything 'cause my mother was a stickler about not wanting us to eat candy.

So of course I would have to go find and sneak.

And now I can remember the shame that I felt.

I became bulimic.

I wasn't throwing up, but I was exercising a lot.

And then I binge and then starve.

And by the time I got into Ballet West, when I was 20, it was full-fledged.

Mom and Dad knew I was unhappy.

They didn't know why, but I think they'd seen throughout my career, especially in Ballet West, that I could never achieve the status in the company that I'd wished, because my weight was always fluctuating up and down.

And they knew, they just instinctively knew that it was coming to an end.

[piano] [clapping] They had put so much of their hopes, especially Mom, her hope into me as a dancer, that I couldn't tell her in person.

So I wrote her a long letter.

I wrote both of them and I explained very logically, very chronologically what was going on, and that I just couldn't, I couldn't continue dancing anymore.

It was gonna kill me.

[ballet music] Dance is more joyful for me now than it's ever been, ever.

I don't have that love/hate thing.

It's not my profession anymore.

I did it when I was young.

I never thought I'd dance again after I had the boys, ever.

I figured I'm done and I'll just look at it from afar.

I started ballroom dancing and I got that third chance.

I was crying, angry.

All this stuff came bubbling up to the surface, but I didn't want to stop.

And it helped me through a most difficult time of my life.

That was my therapy.

And when I don't dance, I get really down.

I didn't have this when I was young.

I get to express myself dancing with joy.

There's no emotional pain about it.

It's with love now, and it comes from my soul, and I won't stop until I have to.

Hopefully, never.

There's no other feeling [soft piano music] in the world like dancing.

I didn't think I would be coming back to it.

But I do understand that it is always a part of you, it never ends.

All these years later, I understand something about it that I didn't understand then, that what was necessary for me to do as a young person was to separate myself from my mother's identity, so that I could understand who she was as a person and that I was another person.

As independent a person as I was, I still had that bond to our mother, to my mother.

I had a bond that I couldn't tear away from.

[Fernande] Well, you were always loved anyway.

Even if you thought you were neglected, and it's true, if you do this to your kids, then they leave you.

But they come back.

Well, what they do is they start to depend more on themselves.

[Fernande] I think that is true, and that's what I like about all of you.

And my kids, they depend on themselves, you know?

And I felt proud that it was so.

I didn't feel bad about it.

I feel proud.

Because it's like... like birds in a nest.

You want them to learn to fly and then to fly away.

But it's a double edge... You feel... you have to let go.

[soft music] [music intensifies] [laughing] Two old ladies.

[Vera] She called us old ladies.

[laughing] [soft piano music]